Questions of Travel (9 page)
SHE WAS LEADING AN
improvised, peripatetic, rather hectic life. There was the illusion of flight and the safety of tether. Days passed like a sequence of swiftly dealt cards. She was happy, she would have said.
But there is always time for the worry-worm to tunnel through, especially around 3 a.m. On a futon in Clapham, Laura thought, I’m growing old. Her days were so various that she hadn’t seen them piling up. She had always pictured a life shaped by books or art hovering there, in the distance. But now her thirtieth birthday was no longer unimaginable. She couldn’t go on waitressing forever. The brilliance of Doc Martens notwithstanding, her calves ached.
Not for the first time, she considered going home. There were days when she could have wept for the blue fern-leaf of that harbor. But Charlie’s last letter had introduced a girl called Fee. She made surrealist—or possibly socialist: his scrunched writing!—sculptures from dirty crockery. With Charlie she would have no shortage of raw material, thought Laura, uncharacteristically sour. He had noted, in a marginal scrawl, that their child would be born in May.
There came the memory—slipping in like a blade—of the Balinese family to whom she had never written. Laura told herself that they would have long forgotten her. This failed to cauterize because it missed the wound: namely, that she was unable to forget them.
At length, the late-night swirl of remorse, indecision and creeping, unfocused fear drove her to the bottle of valerian. Waiting for it to take effect, I need to do something about a career, she thought.
The community center was offering an evening course in word-processing for beginners. Fluorescently illuminated, Laura clutched a mouse and tried to keep her green cursor from sliding off the screen.
She was the youngest person in the room. Everyone else my age already knows how to do this, realized Laura. She heard the
whoosh
of the technological future as it rushed past.
But the course progressed and so did she. Soon she was cutting and pasting text, copying documents, experimenting with formats, getting the hang of keyboard shortcuts. She recalled typing classes at school. All that fiddling with Tipp-Ex and ribbons! Here words ran across her screen or were removed with the same untrammeled ease.
The classes were held in a red-brick school. Laura’s seat was by the window. She looked out into the night and was rewarded by the reflected sight of fifteen humans contained in a big lighted box and mesmerized by small ones.
The white-haired man at the adjoining work station looked her way just then. Their glances appeared to meet in the window, although his was doubly veiled by glass. Laura risked a smile that wasn’t returned.
During the break halfway through the class, she noticed him looking at a jam jar that held a quarter-inch of damp, stained sugar into which other people had been sticking their spoons. Laura said, “Hang on.” She grabbed an unopened packet from the shelf in the kitchenette.
He was already scraping the brownish contents of the jar into his polystyrene cup. “This is ample.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He held out the box of Liptons. Laura wanted Nescafé but didn’t wish to seem rude.
Sipping brown water, they stood a little apart.
She had seen his daughter, a girl of barely twenty, accompanied by a small boy, greet him after class. All three wore coats that seemed too large yet inadequate against merciless March.
On an impulse Laura told him her name, adding, “I’m from Australia.”
He considered this. Then asked if she knew the Nullarbor.
“Not really. I’m from Sydney.”
He remained silent, which muddled her into asking if he’d been to Australia.
He had not. He added, “I would like to see the Nullarbor.”
Why?
His rather elegant hand traced an arc: oh, you know. “There is nothing like it in my country.”
So then she could ask where that was without fear of sounding racist.
“Sri Lanka.”
“Oh!” cried Laura. “I really, really wanted to go there when I was in India. But there was a lot of unrest. People said it wasn’t safe. This was a few years back?”
He didn’t respond.
“Have things settled down since? Politics, I mean.” She could hear her hateful, bright chatter but was powerless to strangle it.
He appeared to reflect. Then he shrugged. He had drunk his tea but went on holding his cup in both hands, as though it might still yield warmth.
How long had he been in England?
“Two months. Before, we were in Germany for six, seven months. Stuttgart.”
She kept her eyes from his heartbreaking maroon jumper with the too-long sleeves. “Winter must have been a shock.”
People were leaving the kitchen. He held out his hand for her cup and binned it along with his. He said, “It is the winter in people’s hearts that is hard to bear.”
The girl and her son were waiting when the class ended. At the sight of his grandfather, a smile splashed all over the child’s face.
It was not that the Sri Lankan man avoided her, exactly. But he never chose the monitor next to hers, and during their tea break he visited the lavatory, or stood at the window with his maroon back to the room.
Arriving for her last-but-one class, Laura saw a thin, bespectacled figure herding his flock between walls of institutional beige. The girl’s black plait, hanging down over her collar to her hips, was the thickness of Laura’s not inconsiderable wrist.
Mother and child turned into a room where—Laura glanced at the sign taped to the door—Beginners English was conducted. A teacher was already writing on a whiteboard. Laura smiled at the old man as she caught up with him, expecting no more in return. But he quickened his step to walk beside her to their classroom around the corner.
They were the first to arrive. She asked, as they unwound scarves, if his daughter was enjoying her classes.
He replied indirectly, saying that the Catholic aid agency responsible for bringing the family to Europe was paying for English lessons. As he already spoke the language, he had elected to study word-processing instead.
“And your grandson, how’s he finding it?” Laura was struck by a thought. “Are there other children in that class? I thought it was all adults.”
He replied that the boy was learning English at school. “He goes with his mother to her classes but sits quietly and draws.” He said, “That is a child who loves to draw.”
“I used to be like that,” confided Laura.
When he next spoke, he said, “She is my wife. The boy is her son.”
“Oh. I see.”
For a while, each contemplated her manifest lie. Laura Fraser was pretty shocked, in her puritan young soul, by the disparity in age.
He had pushed up the sleeves of his jumper. Below blue flannel cuffs, his wrist bones were white-tufted. She pictured them roving the girl’s sweet flesh.
But he was more than a match for her brutality. “Soldiers came to my wife’s village when she was twelve. One of them fathered the boy.”
The following week, at the end of their final class, Laura went up to the child. He had taken an instinctive half-step behind his mother at the approach of this large stranger. But huge black eyes peered when Laura said, “I’ve brought you a present.”
She had taken some trouble with the parcel, wrapping it first in midnight-blue tissue scattered with glitter and stars. The whole was finished with clear cellophane and done up with silver string.
The child looked up at his mother, then accepted the celestial object with both hands.
There were flat golden flowers in the girl’s lobes. Her tiny face, adorned with luxuriant sideburns, was so dark that the scarlet bindi on her forehead stood out like a jewel. Beaming, she recited, “Thank-you-we-are-nice-to-meet-you-please-don’t-trouble.”
The child was transfixed by a rainbow in a tin.
“Goodbye,” said Laura. “And all the very best.”
At the bend in the passage, she glanced back at them. All three—the man, the girl and her son—stood watching her. Laura bowed her head.
HIS SON’S EARS APPEARED
remarkable to Ravi: so perfectly curled!
Malini was pushing her face into the baby’s neck. Ravi heard, “Who did a lovely big fart? Such a stinky fart! Who did a big fart?”
With his fingernail, he drew a heart transfixed with an arrow on his wife’s leg. Every morning, Malini dotted her shins with Nivea from a blue tin and rubbed in the precious moisturizer. But parallel white tracks still appeared whenever she scratched her legs.
Husband and wife went for walks together and talked about everything. Sometimes they would buy a sweepstake ticket from one of the small boys who roamed the streets selling hope. But their great treat was to buy ice-cream cones, which they would eat strolling around the cricket ground or along the beach. Sooner or later, their route would take them past a giant banyan tree. It stood in a patch of waste ground by the side of the road, but was encroaching on the asphalt; the edge of the road had cracked and tilted up. Ravi had always disliked the banyan. It drank light through its roots, and its dark armpits spread. But Malini liked to linger there, in the tree’s deep shade.
Long afterwards, when Ravi tried to picture happiness, it was those evenings that came. Folded into them were older memories: his feet planted next to his father’s in damp yellow sand, or the smell of candle wax as he puffed his cheeks over an iced cake. All the happy moments were connected, like bright rooms opening on to one another. Yet the young couple’s conversation, as they planned how they would live, was often grave.
There was the question of whether they should try to emigrate. The insurgency had ended, but the war for and against a Tamil homeland dragged on. There were assassinations, retaliations, disappearances, suicide bombers; the killing had been going on for years. One night, a little further down the coast, the incoming tide had brought what seemed to be a collection of colossal turds. The sun, creeping up on the array, revealed bodies from which the heads and limbs had been removed.
Ravi was the kind of person whose heart contracted at the sight of a frog-shape mashed into the road. But dailiness normalizes everything, even slaughter. And Ravi was young—what he feared wasn’t extinction but exclusion. He was haunted by the sense that he was witnessing the birth of a new world. A digital revolution was gathering speed. He ached to be part of it. Soon it would transform the way everyone lived, he told Malini; its power, located everywhere and nowhere, would exceed armies. He used a word that had become fashionable:
global.
Malini said, “Who’ll be left if we all emigrate? Only idiots and brutes.”
Her attachment to the country was a blind thing, tunneling up through the years. Her father, once a journalist of some renown, had taken her all over the island when she was a child. She had seen Jaffna and the great blue harbor at Trincomalee. From a beach where spindly casuarinas grew, she had waded into the sea. “For miles. The water never came over my arms.”
Her father had shown her the chain of tiny islands at the northern tip of the country that linked it to India. In Islamic legend it was known as Adam’s Bridge. “But then Daddy told me that Hindus call it Rama’s Bridge. That was so typical of him. He was always trying to teach me that everyone has their own version of events.”
Ravi thought of his father-in-law: a wall topped with broken glass. It had been a long time since a newspaper had employed him. In Welikade jail in 1983, psychopaths kept under lock and key had been excited with stimulants, provided with weapons and turned loose on the Tamil political prisoners. Malini’s father, tipped off by a warder, arrived in time to see what they had achieved. After that, his drinking was never less than daily and fabulous. He had been known to strike his wife, igniting Malini’s fury. But Ravi, walking in on an argument that ended when the old man picked up a slipper and hurled it at the girl, sensed that this was the parent who mattered; the knotted force of Malini’s rage suggested its origin in foiled love. By contrast, her attitude towards her mother, a soft-armed woman with a secretive smile, was at once protective and laced with contempt.
Snooping among his wife’s belongings, Ravi had found an old exercise book. Between stiff red cardboard covers, it contained verses she had copied out, exhortations, lists of Hit Parade songs, sporadic diary-like jottings. He read,
Friendship is a china bowl / Costly, rich and rare. / Once it’s broken, can’t be mended / The crack is always there.
Someone, identified only as T, was “an open door leading nowhere.” On her sixteenth birthday, there was an entry in red ink and capital letters: I RESOLVE NOT TO LIVE MY LIFE IN VAIN.
One evening, under a luminous green sky, she told him about the earth’s shadow. The phenomenon was easily observed on the east coast, where, a few minutes before the sun went down, an ominous band showed on the horizon. It was nothing less than the shadow of the whole planet cast up on the atmosphere. As the sun sank, the shadow crept higher, then gradually faded away. Its ascent was thrilling and frightening. Almost no one noticed it. “That’s the way with people, you have to point out what’s under their eyes.” Ravi felt accused, although Malini’s tone was offhand and her thoughts had already skipped on. Why, she wondered, was “nightfall” the standard expression? Night didn’t fall. She had seen it rising above the earth.